The FBI Goes To Disturbing Lengths To Set Up Potential Terrorists

James Cromitie, center, is led by police officers from
a federal building in New York after being arrested for plotting
to bomb New York synagogues and shoot down military
aircraft.AP

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has busted an impressive
number of homegrown terror plots over the past decade, but many
people don't realize how these plots materialize. In some cases,
they are hatched not from a cave-dwelling fanatic, but actually
from the Bureau itself.

The once exclusively
investigative bureau has morphed into a counterterrorism agency,
with field agents tapping into a nationwide network of informants
that infiltrate mainly-Muslim communities.

The FBI targets the "disgruntled few" who would participate in a
terrorist plot if given the opportunity, according to Aaronson.
In many cases, the FBI recruits potential terrorists and provides
them with plans, equipment, and weapons — before finally shutting
them down and getting credit for thwarting another attack.

The charges and his later conviction stemmed mostly from online
conversations he was having with a Montana judge (and FBI
informant) he believed was a terrorist leader.

But would Reynolds have gone that far on his
own? An
FBI official speaking to Fox News on condition of
anonymity said "that the agency has since concluded that Reynolds
might be mentally ill and not as serious a threat as originally
believed."

***

Another case
in May 2007 involved men who certainly weren't fans of the United
States, but had scarce means of carrying out an attack.

Five foreign-born men, described by federal authorities as
"radical Islamists," along with a sixth man who helped get them
weapons, were charged in May 2007 in a plot to attack a U.S. Army
base in Fort Dix, N.J.

Officials later admitted the men had no apparent connection to
any terrorist organization. The Washington
Postwrites:

At the same time, a 26-page indictment unsealed Tuesday
indicates that the group had no rigorous military training and
did not appear close to being able to pull off an
attack. The arrests in the case began Monday night
after two defendants arrived at a local home to buy assault
weapons, which had been supplied and disabled by the FBI,
officials said.

"Obviously, these guys had some radical beliefs and the stuff
they downloaded from the Web was very serious," said a law
enforcement source close to the case, speaking to The Washington Post. "But it's
not like they were going to be able to get rocket-propelled
grenades and blow things up."

... far from being active militants, the four men [the FBI
informant] attracted were impoverished individuals struggling
with Newburgh's grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty.
One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles
of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign
country.

At one point during the sting, James Cromitie, the leader of the
four-man group, reportedly tried to thwart the plan himself.

For weeks, he pretended to leave Newburgh to avoid his terrorist
contact Hussain (a paid FBI informant). He stopped going to the
mosque, and ignored Hussain's phone calls and voice mails. He
even went so far as to pretend not to be in when he showed up at
his house.

"The essence of what occurred here is that a government
understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism
came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was
incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own," McMahon
said, referring to Cromitie.

And although Judge Colleen McMahan would reject Cromitie's claims
of entrapment, she still called the FBI's handling of the case a
"fantasy terror operation," as The
New York Timesreported:

“Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr.
Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its
scope."

***

The arrests and convictions of men who didn't have the means to
conduct an attack without FBI help certainly raises ethical
questions. While they have been able to stop actual threats — it
seems that in some other cases, the line between real and
contrived has often blurred.

"When the government supplies a fake bomb and then thwarts
the plot, this is insanity. This is grandstanding," said Susanne
Brody, one of the defense attorneys for another terror case in
Portland, Ore.

"The people they repeatedly come up with continue to be people
who have no ability to do something on their own," said Samuel
Braverman, a defense attorney in the Newburgh case.

In spending all of this time concocting terrorist plots, the FBI
may be wasting resources and ignoring the real
threats. As one terrorism analyst at Stanford University
writes,
the priority for Islamic fighters now is actually to expel
Westerners from their lands, not attack them in their own:

Many assume that jihadists all want to attack the West, and
that those who leave do so for training. I argue the
opposite, namely, that most Western jihadists prefer foreign
ﬁghting, but a minority attacks at home after being
radicalized, most often through foreign ﬁghting or contact
with a veteran.